Meet BeagleV™: The First Affordable RISC-V Single Board Computer Designed To Run Linux

On January 13th, 2021, Seeed and BeagleBoard.org® have announced an official collaboration with the leading RISC-V solutions provider, StarFive, to create the latest member of the BeagleBoard.org® series, BeagleV™. (pronounced Beagle five). BeagleV™ is also the first Single Board Computer that Seeed brings to the community in 2021.

BeagleV™ is the first affordable RISC-V board designed to run Linux. Based on the RISC-V architecture, BeagleV™ pushes open-source to the next level and gives developers more freedom and power to innovate and design industry-leading solutions with an affordable introductory price at $149.

Get access to pre-order and being one of the first to get hands-on with the boards

BeagleV™ will be available for early access in March with larger availability in September. Starting from the release on January 13th, as there are limited quantities at release, all customers looking to get their hands on a BeagleV™ from the first batch of the 8GB version are required to apply through this application form. We are looking forward to seeing what bright ideas all developers and enthusiasts have planned for the board. Apply the board now and be one of the first to get your hands on the highly anticipated BeagleV™ and break free from proprietary software and hardware.

Dual-core 64-bit RISC-V CPU plus powerful AI features

The early access version with 8GB RAM features powerful AI performance (3.5T NVDLA, 1T NNE), built-in ISP/NNE, PCle 3.0,1 Gigabit ethernet, and a dual-core 64-bit RISC-V CPU with 8GB of LPDDR memory. It also has a dedicated hardware encoder/decoder supporting H.264 4k@60fps making it a perfect edge computing device with powerful AI capability.

Supported by mainline Linux and a Debian-based BeagleBoard.org® open-source software image, BeagleV™ is ready for development out-of-the-box and prepared for the future.

BeagleV™ supports a high-level of flexibility in development, which gives Linux users more flexibility from silicon to hardware. BeagleV™ is built around RISC-V U74 Dual-core with 2MB L2 cache @ 1.0GHz and the processor offers highly integrated and powerful AI features including:

• Vision DSP Tensilica-VP6 for computing vision

• NVDLA Engine 1 core (configuration 2048 MACs@800MHz )

• Neural Network Engine (1024MACs@500MHz)

Turnkey Custom Services for RISC-V

The entire production of BeagleV™ will be entrusted to Seeed. With more than 10 years of design and manufacturing experience, Seeed can reliably produce custom RISC-V boards that are fully up to spec. Furthermore, Seeed Fusion will soon launch turnkey services for RISC-V enclosures, expansion boards, mainboards and even chips. Watch this space. For any customization solution counseling, feel free to email us via [email protected].

Developed by three reliable parties together: Seeed Studio, BeagleBoard.org®, and StarFive

BeagleV™ marks the first time that hardware development has ever achieved this level of freedom and openness, and the significance of the revolutionary collaboration is the shared purpose of the three parties, Seeed Studio, BeagleBoard.org® and StarFive, which is to make the open-source community stronger and more sustainable.

BeagleV™ provides the open-source community with the opportunity to build projects with a higher performance development board. Our vision is to help and enable the RISC-V ecosystem to grow, to productize RISC-V based projects, and to contribute much more open hardware in the global developer community. The three companies with special business models have worked closely together to deliver a revolutionary platform that completely opens up computer equipment and makes it available to users. BeagleV™ acts as a milestone to the world of open-source and provides a stronger and more flexible way for developers to extend their projects and to make a much more thriving community. We expect the upcoming edge computing and AI to be able to bring you more revolutionary new hardware.

BeagleBoard.org® and Seeed are excited about StarFive’s upcoming production Jinghong SOC this summer, and the continued partnership with StarFive and the RISC-V community to expand RISC-V to more applications.

Partnership and company introduction

About Seeed

As a long-term advocator and supporter of the open-source community, Seeed has devoted 12 years to the open-source hardware field to serve the global developer community by providing affordable and accessible hardware components and devices that integrate the manufacturing supply chain resources in Shenzhen. Seeed will soon launch industrial-grade turnkey Fusion services around BeagleV™ for customization from software, enclosures, expansion boards, mainboards, all the way to silicon solutions.

About StarFive

StarFive is the leader of RISC-V technology and ecosystem development. The company offers a complete and silicon-proven portfolio of RISC-V CPU IP series. It also provides platform-based software and hardware full-stack chip solution. StarFive products are widely used in smart home appliances, traffic management, wearable devices, solid-state storage, network communications, and edge computing, etc.

About BeagleBoard.org®

BeagleBoard.org® (501(c)(3) non-profit) founded in 2008 has created over 10 open hardware single-board computers (SBCs) focused on providing education and collaboration around the design and use of open-source software and hardware in embedded computing. BeagleBoard.org®’s forum of tens of thousands of developers encourages and supports the use of open-source software and hardware with the exchange of ideas, knowledge, and experience. The BeagleBoard.org® community collaborates on the development of open-source computing solutions in all industry segments and enables customization and ownership by all users. 

Apply the boards now and let us know your expectation for BeagleV™! Please also feel free to email us via [email protected] for any needs!

If you’re interested in more RISC-V related articles, do check out the other ones down below!

What is RISC-V

RISC-V is an open standard instruction set architecture (ISA) based on established reduced instruction set computer (RISC) principles.

Unlike most other ISA designs, the RISC-V ISA is provided under open source licenses that do not require fees to use.

A number of companies are offering or have announced RISC-V hardware, open-source operating systems are available and the instruction set is supported in several popular software toolchains.

Look back at the previous blog:

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